NOTHING TO SHOW FOR IT

Tim Blair

–,
Thursday,
February,
21,
2013,(1:17pm)

If you’re going to go for Big Government, you might as well have something to show for it. Sweden and Denmark have the Oresund Bridge, Britain and France the Channel Tunnel, Russia the St. Petersburg flood barrier. But, four years after Obama’s first stimulus bill, America still isn’t shovel-ready. A New York flood barrier? As the president would say, you didn’t build that, and neither will he.

Likewise, in Australia we have Big Government minus any useful Big Things. Our current mob can’t even get a Big Tax right:

‘’Would the government have been worse off in the past six months with the original resource super profits tax? Yes. That’s a big fat yes,’’ said Chris Richardson, a former Treasury economist now at Deloitte Access …

‘’People are screaming that the revised tax is a disaster because it has hardly raised any money. But they would have been screaming more if we had the original tax – it would have cost the government money.’’

Well, just wait until the Goose hears what Berlusconi has just dreamed up in Italy, where people are already rioting just as in Greece over the small detail of Germany only lending & not giving the spoiled brats money for food. Our mongrel Labor/union party is heading exactly the same way & added to their blatant vote buying is the added bonus of slandering & sliming the opposition!

Frankly, I suspect the words “depressingly little to show” are words that would come to Swannie more than once in his repeated attempted transitions from short pants to trousers over the past 5 or 6 years.

You can tell that nobody in Julia’s government can think practically. All they had to do is suggest to Julia that if she let some significant piece of infrastructure be built she could name it after herself. Somehow the NBN does not lend itself to something like that particularly when most people want no part of it.

If you’re going to go for Big Government, you might as well have something to show for it.

And that’s what hurts. Here we are, stuck with record debt (at the time of record government receipts!) with absolutely bloody nothing to show for it.

If we had some flash new inter-capital high speed railways, new shipping or airports, new dams, major works providing flood and drought proofing, or any new infrastructure or defence spending the pain wouldn’t be so high.

But here we are with nothing but debt. Maxwell will never be forgiven.

Mr Swan still talks with pride about being the “Treasurer of the year” despite the fact that the European magazine who bestowed that title on him also awarded Lehman Brothers as being the risk manager of the year in 2006.

The design of the National Broadband Network rollout can still be changed, NBN Co head Mike Quigley has declared, as he threw his support behind a study on the merits of different super-fast broadband technologies.

Speaking at an American Chamber of Commerce lunch in Sydney yesterday, Mr Quigley said that despite being four years into the rollout of the $37.4 billion network, it was not too late to discuss the future of the NBN and make decisions based on “good data and facts”.

Mr Quigley said that he had recently approached the telecommunications industry peak body, the Communications Alliance, to initiate the study in an effort to “bring commercial reality to the theoretical debate” on broadband technologies. “Having an open debate that weighs up the pros and cons of alternatives can only be positive,” he said.